An Insider’s Tour of Chongqing Yields Frugal Gems

As we drove down the mountain from Lao Jun Dong, a Taoist temple perched above the smoggy mega-city of Chongqing, I tried to describe to YangYang, my host and a local magazine editor, the kind of restaurant where I wanted to eat that Sunday evening.

It had to be cheap, have no English menu, perhaps in a run-down neighborhood and serve local dishes spiced for local tastes.

“I know some places,” she said. “But they are unsuitable for tourists.”

“Yes!” I shouted. “Perfect! Take me to the place most unsuitable for tourists.”

A few hours later we were sitting at a sidewalk table, drinking local Shancheng beer from bowls, our hands in plastic gloves as we used toothpicks to extract snails from their shells after digging them out from under an avalanche of Sichuan peppers. The place – to me a restaurant, to her a street vendor – was Du Lao Wu, on Jianking Road. The menu, of course, was only in Chinese, so I had told YangYang just to order “whatever is most unsuitable for tourists.” That included the snails (20 renminbi, or about $3.25 at 6.15 renminbi to the dollar), as well as crawfish in a similarly messy and difficult-to-eat format (38 renminbi), as well as a salad of yuxiang cao, which means “fishy-smell herb” and is accurately named. YangYang had come through.

I very rarely reveal my identity as a travel writer while on the road, but YangYang, who had been hosting me for free through Couchsurfing.org, had shown such generosity – inviting me to both her magazine’s Chinese New Year party and a lavish dinner with some friends (presenting me at both as a professor of Latin American Studies, my impromptu cover) – that I decided to make a calculated exception.

Toward the end of my trip up the Yangtze, I had been planning to move on to Chengdu, the more tourist-friendly capital of neighboring Sichuan province. But I had taken a liking to Chongqing and decided to ask YangYang – whose real name is Jiang Yu – if she would use her expertise – her magazine’s English name was “City Weekly” – to show me an insider’s version of the city.

The insider’s view was especially appealing in Chongqing: It is scarily huge, as if someone had placed midtown Manhattan in a photocopier that spit out 100 copies in all directions; the municipality, which separated from Sichuan province in 1997, has almost 30 million inhabitants. It is also scarily polluted. In February, when I visited, what must have been a breathtaking skyline was perpetually invisible and my nostrils burned from day 1. Even when YangYang brought me to spots that she said had great views, just a few ghostly buildings were barely visible through the haze. (Her advice: come in April or May, when rains wash out the haze, or in the fall, but not in the summer when the air is clear but miserably hot.)

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The skyline of Chongqing, shrouded in smog. Credit Seth Kugel

With YangYang’s help, I was able to cut through that haze and find some gems. On Monday morning, she took me to the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, a well-respected university. Long before you see the campus, you know art students have been at work. All along Huang Jue Ping Street, the area’s main drag, ratty apartment and commercial buildings have been covered with playful (and officially sanctioned) street art: cartoonish monkeys here, green-and-yellow camouflage-like patterns there, bursts of color everywhere.

The campus, which used to house a military arsenal, has received the same treatment. YangYang took me by Tank Loft Zone B, a one-time military installation where amoebic, semi-extraterrestrial figures are painted, each uttering one English word: “COME” “ON” “BABY” “YO.” But the main attraction for visitors is the Tank Lofts, which have been repurposed and redecorated (again, street art style), but are still punctuated by propaganda signs from the Cultural Revolution, as well as a real live tank. Should you be tempted to hang from the turret, I can confirm it supports weight of up to 190 pounds.

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The Ban Xian gallery specializes in works from the Han Dynasty.Credit Seth Kugel

It was the start of winter break, so not all the galleries were open, but YangYang took me into one that was, a whitewashed space called Ban Xian (unlabeled in English but identifiable by two characters painted in red on a black sign). Inside are elegantly displayed wood carvings and clay figures largely from the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.).

Leaving the campus we stopped by a student haunt, a store at Huang Jue Ping 122. The English sign reads “Himalaya Book” and some art books are in English. It was also a perfect frugal stop: the Wi-Fi, coffee and even snacks are all free. It’s run by an artist, Liu Jing Huo, who doesn’t seem to care much about profits, and who joined us for lunch at a restaurant a few blocks down the main street, Ti Kan Dou Hua, where we sat wooden benches around darkly-stained tables within rather grungy walls. A string of dishes arrived at our table: soft tofu, chitterlings, pork belly with mustard greens, and a shockingly delicious steamed pig foot ran us just 34 renminbi each.

The massive building boom has caused old Chongqing to recede, but YangYang still fit in as many old-school attractions as possible. That included eating a traditional breakfast of xiao mian, a five-renminbi bowl of noodles (available at food stalls everywhere around town) and seeing a French naval garrison from the early 20th century, at some point converted to a tea house but now privately owned. She even included the city’s most touristy spot, which attempts to recreate old Chongqing: Hongya Cave, a multi-level faux-traditional complex along the Jialing River. Admittedly, its traditional architecture make for a pleasant place to shop (on the “Traditional Crafts Street”) and great place to eat (on the “Folk Food Street”; don’t miss the taro and pork fried dumplings at Ba Gou Tie, for 12 remnimbi). But I preferred another faux-traditional spot: Fu Qiao, a chain of massage parlors with corny traditional interior, where 80 renminbi gets you a 90-minutes full body rubdown.

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The Lao Jun Dong temple, perched above Chongqing.Credit Seth Kugel

Nothing beat that mountainside temple, though. YangYang had to make some phone calls, so I left her in the car, paid the 10-renminbi admission, and walked about an impressive warren of buildings, climbing the steps up the side of the mountain, through a cave and past stone carvings to a brightly colored temple with four-tiered pagoda roof and upturned eaves on the top.

Outside one of the lower temple buildings, I was struck by a man wearing a black robe and a wispy chin beard, his long hair tied up with a wooden pin. He sat at a table outside one of the temple buildings, conferring with mostly young visitors. As so often happened during my China trip, a young man greeted me in English. He explained that the man – perhaps a temple priest – was explaining fortunes to those who had kneeled at an altar inside, shaken a can of long thin sticks until one fell out, and exchanged it for an explanatory paper covered in Chinese characters, which the man then interpreted. (The process, I later learned, is called kau cim.) The young man agreed to be my interpreter. My fortune: I should open up my heart and use my passion, sensitivity and honesty to touch the woman who is the object of my affections.

On my second and final night, it was time try Chongqing’s best-known meal: the hotpot. Supposedly developed along the piers of old Chongqing for sailors and dockworkers, the hotpot is a vat of heated oil spiced up with wicked Sichuan chilies and mouth-numbing Sichuan peppercorns. You order raw vegetables and meats from a menu, place them in the oil until cooked, dunk them in a sesame oil sauce, and munch away.

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A geometric view of the Lao Jun Dong temple.Credit Seth Kugel

I was delighted to find that there were two kinds of hotpot places: suitable for tourists, and unsuitable. YangYang not only knew which I would choose, she completely agreed: the “unsuitable” ones used and reused beef tallow instead of oil as the base of their bubbling cauldrons, which even some local people found unsanitary. But YangYang said her friends were pro-fat and anti-oil. “The taste and smell of it is very important for us,” she said, noting that the traditional places were easily identified because they smelled like a huge grease trap.

She took me to a place called Zhu Ma (on Qing Feng South Road near the corner of Dusong Road), where diners sit on simple wooden stools around white tables with their centers cut out for the hotpot. The pot itself was a scary looking thing – a miniature version of the sort of cauldron you might pour over a castle wall to stop incoming barbarians. YangYang ordered vegetables, butterfish, duck intestine and pig stomach, as well as an odd side dish called “golden bread” that came pretty close to resembling a frosted Cinnabon (not intended for dunking).

I tried everything without complaint and was pleased when YangYang charmingly declared I had “a Chongqing stomach.” In truth, I could have lived without the stomach and duck intestine. I did fall in love, unexpectedly, with another dish: thinly sliced kidney wrapped around a fresh load of scallions, ginger and bean sprouts and secured with toothpicks. Even after you pluck it from the hotpot, douse it in the sauce and place it in your mouth, it remains burning hot, spicy from the chilies and laced with the mouth-numbing peppercorns. But once you chomp down, the whole thing changes: the bean sprouts crunch and the scallion and ginger flavor blasts through the spice and numbness.